Question

Coldfusion 5 to cold fusion mx 6.1 question

Asked by: sbalen

Have a zope/plone freak who swares that it will take major recoding to go from coldfusion 5 to coldfusion mx 6.1? Can anyone shed some light on this? How difficult will it be really?

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Asked On
2005-08-22 at 17:58:15ID21536145
Tags

coldfusion

Topics

ColdFusion Application Server

,

ColdFusion Studio

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Answers

 

by: mmc98dl1Posted on 2005-08-22 at 18:12:40ID: 14729907

I dont think so.  We recently moved an enterprise app from 4.5 to 7 with little difficulty - it took 3 developers 2 weeks to get it running.

Having said that we dont use any tags like cfupdate, cflogin etc.

Read the release notes for 6.1 to get a good idea of what you might be affected by:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/coldfusion/releasenotes/mx/mx61_release_notes.html

Ben Forta on 6.1 and how it differs from pre CFMX:
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/intro_61.html

 

by: pinaldavePosted on 2005-08-22 at 18:22:44ID: 14729946

Besides good explaination from mmc98dl1.
I will say it is really not difficult. We moved from 5 to 6.1 and it was no problem at all. Not a single one.
Recently we moved from 6.1 to 7 and have found not a single one.
I guess the reason is simple : We do not use any CFUDATE, CFINSERT, CFTABLE, CFTREE at all.
CFCHART is the only tag might need some changes but it is still work great.
CFMAIL needs to be checked.

Most of what I said is already mentioned in the different sub links which you can reach from the mail link mmc98 provided. Do not assign me points. I am just confirming what it is .

 

by: sbalenPosted on 2005-08-22 at 18:27:40ID: 14729960

I appreciate this feedback, keep the suggestions coming and I will dole out more points!

 

by: pinaldavePosted on 2005-08-22 at 18:28:42ID: 14729968

Hi sbalen,
Just a polite reminder: The max points you can assign is 500 for any Question.
Regards,
---Pinal

 

by: sbalenPosted on 2005-08-22 at 18:30:01ID: 14729972

can I split it up amongst good answers?

 

by: pinaldavePosted on 2005-08-22 at 18:30:42ID: 14729978

Hi sbalen,
yes you can sure do that. You can split 500 points among all the good answer. :)
Regards,
---Pinal

 

by: mmc98dl1Posted on 2005-08-22 at 18:52:24ID: 14730052

One more tag to watch: cfhttp.

It was improved and now works great in 6.1 and 7. In 4.5 we used a cfx which was better but not perfect.

 

by: pinaldavePosted on 2005-08-22 at 18:53:24ID: 14730057

that is true but that cfx will still work with hte new version :)

 

by: mmc98dl1Posted on 2005-08-22 at 18:59:19ID: 14730095

Correct pinal - I see that my explanation wasnt very good.

I wanted to point out that you should move to the native CF tag in MX for a speed increase and better handling for timeout and errors.

 

by: andw928Posted on 2005-08-22 at 19:12:00ID: 14730152

 

by: mmc98dl1Posted on 2005-08-22 at 19:40:17ID: 14730240

andw928,

The last 2 links you have posted are specific to version 7 - sbalen says they are moving to 6.1.

Pete Freitags page is very good and informative, but alot of that information is very specific to CFMX7.

The livedocs article is also for CFMX 7 - one example of differences between 6.1 and 7 is cfchart is different.

Whilst the articles may have useful info in them, alot of the information wont work in 6.1

 

by: andw928Posted on 2005-08-22 at 19:43:49ID: 14730253

Okay, then cross out the last link, but the link before the last one doesn't only show changes for version 7, it shows for CFMX and 6.1 as well, look on the right side where it says "Added in this ColdFusion release".

You will see:

"ColdFusion MX 6.1"
"ColdFusion MX"
"ColdFusion MX 7"

Therefore, I'm sure sbalen is knowledgeable enough to look at only the ones that correspond to MX and MX 6.1.

 

by: mrichmonPosted on 2005-08-22 at 20:54:36ID: 14730438

I want to add that your friend may be correct.

If it was not coded properly in the first place then yes.  Most of the code I have seen in CF 5 if the person who owns it thinks that the server has to be rebooted on a regular basis - usually indicates that the code has something wrong and an upgrade to MX will only empahsize that if not re-written.

The usual things that are wrong in CF 5 code or that have trouble migrating:
Memory leaks
Improper locking
tags that are no longer supported like CFGRAPH

If you don't think you have those to worry about then just consult the above references and you should be okay.

Even if the upgrade goes well, you may want to re-code some parts to take advantage of the new features of MX that will make your applications outperform from how they did in CF 5.

 

by: substandPosted on 2005-08-23 at 09:09:35ID: 14734953

definitely watch out for the CFUPDATE and CFINSERTS... don't even bother using them.  When we moved, I had to go through all the old code and rewrite all the queries.  

Also, beware of using the same variable in a strange manner... for instance, in places we had code like this:

<cfif personnelID is 0>
<!--- get the company info --->
        <cfquery name="q1">
            select name, address from company
        </cfquery>
<cfelse>
<!--- get this specific employee info --->
       <cfquery name="q1">
               select name, name as address from company
       </cfquery>
       <cfset q1.address="Something">
</cfif>

Something like this was done in CF5, (because by the rules a person logged in could be either representing the company or himself within the company, so to keep the code the same, you can see what we had done).  In any case, it worked in cf5, but didn't work in mx

But, don't let anything like that discourage you from changing.  You really should, just be prepared for things to go wrong and fix them quickly

 

by: mrichmonPosted on 2005-08-23 at 09:16:34ID: 14735019

substand - I agree - I would recommend against them even in CF 5.  Macromedia engineers have told me there are known bugs and they don't care since they expect people to move away from them as they become more advanced at writing CF, those are in place for beginners or simple sites.

 

by: substandPosted on 2005-08-23 at 09:28:40ID: 14735153

I got a kick out of the bug that gives an error when using cfupdate... make absolutely no changes to the code and just hit refresh a couple of times, and it works again.  so random.


 

by: andw928Posted on 2005-08-23 at 09:31:13ID: 14735184

I wonder why it is so hard for them to fix a <cfupdate>, all it is is a simple query that updates, I don't understand how it can have bugs.

 

by: mrichmonPosted on 2005-08-23 at 09:35:38ID: 14735230

>> I wonder why it is so hard for them to fix a <cfupdate>, all it is is a simple query that updates
You would think...

But they don't really care from what I could tell.  They say it works in the simple situations most of the time (I have found this not to even be true) and they know that the poeple that use CF in enterprise level applications - the ones that will get CF noticed - don't use it anyway so it is really the amateur or beginner that uses those tags and so to Macromedia they are the "little fish" I guess.

 

by: pinaldavePosted on 2005-08-23 at 09:37:28ID: 14735245

I agree. We even do not use <cfquery to run query we use all the stored procedure so use mostly <cfstoreproc....

 

by: andw928Posted on 2005-08-23 at 09:41:19ID: 14735273

If Macromedia would drop all these newbie tags from Coldfusion, then I think Coldfusion wouldn't last too long, that's why they keep these types of tags, and the tag-based language itself. Actually, I think the whole point of Coldfusion is to simplify, was it even meant for Enterprise level apps? I don't think so, we have JSP and Java for that.

I use cfquery, since MySQL 5.0 has sstored procedures but taht isn't even released yet.

 

by: andw928Posted on 2005-08-23 at 17:58:44ID: 14738932

There are some functions you have to watch out for, these are the deprecated functions as of Coldfusion MX:

- The cachepops parameter of GetMetricData().
- The GetK2ServerDocCount() function.
- GetTemplatePath() function.
- IsK2ServerABroker() function.
- IsK2ServerDocCountExceeded() function.
- IsK2ServerDocCountLimit() function.
- IsK2ServerOnLine() function.
- The locale = "Spanish (Mexican)" value of setlocale() function.

Reference: http://livedocs.macromedia.com/coldfusion/7/htmldocs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=ColdFusion_Documentation&file=00000375.htm

Then these are the deprecated tags and tag attributes as of Coldfusion MX:

http://livedocs.macromedia.com/coldfusion/6.1/htmldocs/tags-p18.htm

Hope that helps.

 

by: mmc98dl1Posted on 2005-09-15 at 16:46:11ID: 14894269

split, mrichmon, andw928, pinaldave, mmc98dl1, substand

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